Natalia VodianovaModel Natalia Vodianova plays writer Edith Wharton, whose estate, The Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts, was home to lively gatherings of prominent artists and intellectuals of the early twentieth century.

Jeffrey EugenidesFor Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Jeffrey Eugenides (far left), playing Henry James opposite model Natalia Vodianova as Edith Wharton in a large-scale fashion story was something of a departure. “The experience was a bit like being in a period drama and having very few lines. No lines at all, in fact,” he says. The shoot, which took place over two days at The Mount, Wharton’s summer residence in Lenox, Massachusetts, required little preparation for Eugenides, whose latest book, The Marriage Plot (out this month in paperback from Picador), features a love triangle worthy of his literary forebears. “I’ve read so many of James’s novels, as well as Colm Tóibín’s The Master [a novel based on the life of James] and Leon Edel’s biography. I don’t feel like I resemble Henry exactly, but I understand the man.” Helping him get into character: a mix of Polo Ralph Lauren and Burberry suits and vintage pieces. “With these old shirts, it’s extremely difficult to get the studs through—it makes you aware of what it was like to get dressed in the early 1900s and why you would maybe need a valet to help.”

Chemistry was key in portraying the most legendary friendship in American letters. “I found Natalia to be an amazing person. By the second day, there was warmth and ease, and we were able to feel and act the friendship that Edith Wharton and Henry James had,” says Eugenides, who is currently collaborating on a screen adaptation of The Marriage Plot with Greg Mottola and working on a short story collection. That said, verisimilitude does have its limitations: “If Edith had looked like Natalia, literary history might have gone a bit differently in terms of Henry’s sexuality.”—Megan O’Grady

Elijah Wood“I just got home from DJing in Dublin,” says actor Elijah Wood (second from right). Although most people remember the 31-year-old as Frodo in The Lord of the Rings—a role which he’ll soon be reprising in the film’s eagerly anticipated prequel, The Hobbit—the Los Angeles native is also a globe-trotting DJ with an eclectic taste in obscure world music. “Lately I’ve been playing a lot of psychedelia from places like Brazil, Africa, and Turkey,” Wood continues. “There is an amazing store in New York called Tropicalia in Furs where I get a lot of that stuff.”

It’s a long way from Edith Wharton’s world—Wood played the writer’s friend and chauffeur Charles Cook for Vogue’s photo shoot. But, having just wrapped the action-comedy Pawn Shop Chronicles, he had the chance to further explore his musical side this summer during an intensive course of piano lessons while preparing for an upcoming thriller. (He plays a pianist who is held hostage during a performance.) “I was looking forward to it,” says Wood. “When I was younger I took piano for a few years, and I always wish I’d stuck with it.”—F.C.

Jack HustonGrowing up in England, Jack Huston (far right) first read Edith Wharton’s work in school, where the curriculum centered in large part on masterpieces from across the pond. “We would read Wharton, and we’d read Henry James—more of the American authors,” he says. The transatlantic style suits him: Huston carries a heavy Old World mantle on his mother’s side (her father was the marquess of Cholmondeley) and tinsel on his dad’s (Huston’s grandfather was John Huston, the director). Yet he found himself taking cues from Annie Leibovitz in playing the journalist William Morton Fullerton, Wharton’s mid-life lover, whose liaisons with both men and women traced elaborate geometries through Europe and America. “Annie became a sort of an encyclopedia of knowledge,” he says, acknowledging how the photographer helped to bring period consistency to the story too. “She has such a vision every time she shoots—they’re just mapped out like paintings.”

And yet these days it is literary portraits, more than visual ones, that feed Huston’s burgeoning career. Besides continuing his TV work on the third season of Boardwalk Empire, he’s starring as Jack Kerouac in the forthcoming Kill Your Darlings, a film that focuses on the tumultuous world of Lucien Carr, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs (“the meeting of the Beats, basically”). The next year will also bring Two Jacks, an adaptation of Tolstoy’s Two Hussars, in which Huston shares the limelight with his uncle Danny; the Bille August movie Night Train to Lisbon, based on the internationally best-selling German novel by Pascal Mercier; and December’s Not Fade Away, **David Chase’**s directorial debut, in which Huston plays the front man of a 1960s band. Wharton might have approved. “She was a popular writer, doing almost what the Twilight series would have done now,” Huston says. “House of Mirth sold the most copies of all of her books, and basically turned her into a celebrity.”—Nathan Heller

Juno TempleWhen it comes to putting on elaborate period attire, you could say 23-year-old British actress Juno Temple (at right) is something of an old hand. “I just see it as work now,” says the Somerset native, known for breakout roles in epic historical dramas like Atonement and The Other Boleyn Girl.

Still, that’s not to say getting dressed up as Edith Wharton’s German tutor and lifelong confidante, Anna Bahlmann, was a chore. “Obviously, because it’s a Vogue shoot, the clothes are more flamboyant, and a little more interesting than a typical costume drama,” she says.

While she appeared in contemporary costume in this summer’s box-office smash The Dark Knight Rises, Temple is currently preparing for another throwback, Wild Side—an action-thriller set in the early eighties, in the same vein as True Romance and Wild at Heart (two of her favorite films). She enthusiastically describes her character as “a beauty queen who goes on a killing spree with her boyfriend after stealing diamonds from Nicolas Cage.”

The chance to sport a retro-inspired wardrobe was what initially piqued Temple’s interest in the project in the film. “There will be lots of seventies vibes leaking into it,” she continues. “Out of all the periods I’ve done, the seventies are definitely my favorite.”—Freddie Campion

Photo: Annie Leibovitz (top); Apic/Getty Images

Nate Lowman“It’s really cool to visit there,” recalls artist Nate Lowman (center), who played American sculptor Daniel Chester French for the Vogue shoot, part of which was staged at Chesterwood, French’s Berkshires studio. Now preserved as a museum, the studio highlights that fin-de-siècle artist’s working process, with small-scale models of his iconic, seated portrait of Abraham Lincoln, destined for the Lincoln Memorial. “There were these beautiful old train tracks leading to it, that French used to carry big pieces of stone,” Lowman says. “That was very impressive for someone like myself, who can’t get certain things in and out of his studio.”

Lowman’s exhibition at The Fireplace Project in East Hampton (just across the street from Jackson Pollock’s studio) opens this weekend and runs through September 17. Currently he is preparing for a solo show of painting and sculpture opening in November at the Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Connecticut.

“For me, the interesting thing about Daniel Chester French is that his portraits are also really monuments,” says Lowman, who this past spring exhibited abstract canvases shaped like Swiss cheese and paintings made from drop cloths (at Massimo de Carlo Gallery in Milan). “That’s totally at odds with everything I make, and with the work of almost all my peers,” he continues. “The only monumental sculpture I ever made was my own tombstone.”—Leslie Camhi

Mamie GummerIn a fortuitous stroke of literary destiny, actress Mamie Gummer’s book club, the “Lit Wits”—an unconventional “sisterhoodof the traveling books,” as she puts it—had recently suggested The House of Mirth, and she was midway through when Vogue called about a story on Edith Wharton and The Mount. “I had never been to Lenox, but felt very at home by virtue of the fact that I grew up about a half hour away,” says the 29-year-old actress (far left), who still retreats to her family’s home in Salisbury, Connecticut, spending hours in the gardens tended by her mother, Meryl Streep. “My Mount,” she says with a laugh.

For the Vogue shoot, Gummer played another famous gardener, Wharton’s niece Beatrix Farrand, whose adroit sense of color and botanical knowledge helped her to create some of the most exquisite East Coast landscapes of the early twentieth century, including the kitchen garden, apple orchard, and the long alley of maple trees at Wharton’s estate.

There is little greenery to cultivate at Gummer’s apartment in Brooklyn’s Park Slope, where she recently settled with her husband, actor Benjamin Walker, but her career is blossoming. After recurring roles on The Good Wife and The Big C, Gummer stars as the affably neurotic lead on the CW medical drama Emily Owens, M.D. this fall. “If I do it right,” she says, “it could play like Bridget Jones—if she became a doctor.”—Molly Creeden

Junot Díaz“The first person I saw was Elijah Wood wearing some sort of riding boots,” says the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Junot Díaz (third from left), 43, who traveled to _Vogue’_s shoot in the Berkshires from his home in Boston, where he teaches fiction and literature at MIT. “But he looks so damn young. Elijah Wood! All my boys are going to take away my nerd card because I didn’t recognize him.”

Díaz donned an itchy vintage wool suit (“sartorial discomfort to the ultimate level,” he says) to become turn-of-the-century lawyer and diplomat Walter Van Rensselaer Berry, a beloved member of Wharton’s circle. “I actually did know who he was,” says Díaz. “I had one of those classic English educations at Rutgers. Wharton was certainly on the syllabus.”

Díaz spent downtime on the shoot touring The Mount, chatting with actor Jack Huston—“oh man, that dude is super simpatico”—and paying close attention to Annie Leibovitz. “Fluency and authority were pouring out of her. It’s awesome to see someone at the top of her game.”

The same could be said of Díaz whose new collection of linked stories, This Is How You Lose Her (out this month from Riverhead), is ribald, streetwise, and stunningly moving—a testament, like most of his work, to the yearning, clumsy ways young men come of age. It’s also a companion piece to Díaz’s celebrated 1997 debut, Drown. “I tore that book clean out of my heart,” the writer remembers. The new one is more mature, more patient, more about consequence and loss. “You grow some muscle as a writer,” Díaz says. “As an artist, you become stronger.”—Taylor Antrim

Jonathan Safran Foer“Like many writers I know, being photographed doesn’t come easily,” says Jonathan Safran Foer (second from right), the celebrated author of several books including Everything Is Illuminated and Eating Animals. “In many ways it’s the opposite of writing, when you’re in control of things. Here you’re at the mercy of someone else.”

But having that someone else be Annie Leibovitz was an irresistible enticement to come to The Mount. “I really wanted to meet her and see how she worked,” Foer continues. “She’s incredibly casual and very, very friendly. She made me feel comfortable, which isn’t the easiest thing.”

Foer was dressed in a close-fitting vintage suit and had his own glasses replaced with costume spectacles (leaving the near-sighted author nearly blind) to become Ogden Codman, Jr., the architect and decorator who coauthored Wharton’s The Decoration of Houses. “I hadn’t heard of him,” Foer confesses. “Though I think I look strangely like him.”

Vogue’s shoot came at a busy time. He’s working on two different novels concurrently, as well as writing a show for HBO: “a comedy,” he says, “about a Jewish family in Washington, D.C.” And just days before he traveled to the Berkshires, Foer received a surprise invitation from the White House to attend a state dinner honoring Shimon Peres. “That was really awesome,” he says. Whom to thank for including him? “I don’t really know,” he says with a laugh. “I couldn’t figure out how to ask.”—T.A.

Max MinghellaEver since his turn as Divya Narendra, the smooth Harvard upperclassman who takes on Mark Zuckerberg with the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network, 26-year-old Max Minghella (far right) has not been short on roles with star-making potential (sought after by directors: future leading man quality number one). Next month, he appears alongside Channing Tatum and Justin Long in the high school reunion flick Ten Years, and in October, he’ll star in **Joe Johnston’**s thriller, Not Safe for Work—this after spending the summer in Atlanta to film Vince Vaughn and **Owen Wilson’**s next comedy, The Internship. “I play a bad person,” is all Minghella will say about the role (remaining tight-lipped about high-profile projects: future leading man quality number two).

For the Vogue shoot, Minghella played Maxfield Parrish, the Philadelphia-born artist known for paintings and illustrations infused with neoclassicist drama—nymphs amid Roman columns, cascading waterfalls, sun spilling onto lakeside mountains. Wharton was among the early influencers who recognized something distinctive about Parrish’s work, commissioning his illustrations for her book Italian Villas and Their Gardens. “I pray I’m a slightly better actor than a painter,” says Minghella, who played a painter in 2006’s Art School Confidential. “I can’t draw a stick figure successfully” (charming self-deprecation: future leading man quality number three). Still, the actor, who is the son of the late Oscar-winning director Anthony Minghella, sees comparisons between the kind of circle Wharton brought together in the early 1900s, and the people he seeks out himself. “Life sort of created people to be drawn to one another, regardless of what medium they focus on,” he says. “I was obviously exhilarated to meet Jeffrey Eugenides—and I think I managed not to humiliate myself too much.”—M.C.

Photo: Annie Leibovitz (top); Bettmann/CORBIS

James Corden“My face doesn’t feel right without the mustache,” James Corden (center) says with a deadpan air of complaint, shortly after posing as Theodore Roosevelt. At 33, the British actor has become a young theatrical star with the range and reputation of a veteran—this summer, he won the Tony Award for Best Actor for his role in One Man, Two Guvnors among a slate of nominees including James Earl Jones and Philip Seymour Hoffman—and his quick wit and adipose dexterity help him bring a range of characters to life. Still, Corden says that, being English, he approached the role of Roosevelt with a healthy nescience. “I didn’t know much about him, other than, obviously, if they wanted me to play him, then he looks like Brad Pitt. He was considered a sex symbol,” he explains. “I couldn’t think of any other reason.”

In fact, Roosevelt was more Renaissance man than Renaissance form, and it was in his capacity as “a literary fellow”—a role he embraced almost as avidly as political ambition and outdoorsmanship—that he fell into Edith Wharton’s circle. Both during and following his presidency, Roosevelt corresponded with the novelist, all the while growing into a vocal supporter of women’s rights. And although Corden’s coming work will carry him toward the shoals of pop culture (he’s started filming Can a Song Save Your Life? by Once writer-director John Carney, with Keira Knightley and Mark Ruffalo, and will play British reality-contestant singer Paul Potts in a David Frankel biopic, he says he took immodest pleasure in the period costuming and peaceful mien of The Mount. “It was a very nice, hot day, and we were shooting in a beautiful place, and it was a nice place to be, you know?”—N.H.